Marnie Duarte.

I am a thirty-three-year-old pediatrician.

I had met Dario two years before at a charity gala for a children’s hospital, and it had actually been Blanca who approached me first that night — an elegant older woman making kind conversation about my work with sick kids.

Weeks later she had “happened” to introduce me to her son: forty-one, the director of a private medical group, handsome, attentive, endlessly patient with Kai.

After a hard divorce years earlier, I had let myself believe I’d finally found a safe family for the two of us.